


Springs of the Great Deep

by CiderApples



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: But what else is new?, F/M, Lots of rain, Lots of takeout completely wasted, Lucifer runs away, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-24 04:10:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13205664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples
Summary: Genesis 7:11  -  In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.





	Springs of the Great Deep

* * *

 

On the day the devil finally takes the Detective to bed, it’s raining. Not a light, gentle rain, but a deep, sky-smudging deluge. The streets are a mess of lakes and slicks, and they spend all day avoiding submerged potholes and trying not to hydroplane the squad car. LA’s culverts rush with dark water by the train yards, black as blood under the violent sky, and every time they leave the car they come back completely soaked through, shivering while the heat kicks in.

Maybe it’s the water that provokes Chloe, in the end: Lucifer’s polar opposite.

Maybe it pushes her toward his fire.

Or maybe the relentless hammering hides them from themselves, just long enough to get away: the dark sky shrouding their faces, the roar of the rain keeping their secrets.

 

* * *

 

It’s almost ten at night when they ride the elevator up to his penthouse, and they still don’t know that this is their day.

Chloe holds a bag of very late dinner in her arms, leaning casually in her high-heeled boots and enduring the prickling sensation of her hair slowly drying against her head. She’s excited, not in the happy way, but in the sense that her baseline energy is running high. The storm, maybe. Violent weather affects all animals the same. Her breath is a little fast, and her senses a little finer. She can smell Lucifer next to her: his fancier-than-thou cologne and also the sweat he’s sweating, not because it’s hot but because, he, too, is running high.

Lucifer’s lank frame balances neatly on Italian leather. The shoes are quite ruined by the weather, but he has many more pairs and these aren’t nearly his favorites. He doesn’t carry a thing, and doesn’t think to offer. He’s enjoying the promise of wine, lots of it; and food, lots of it. Chloe’s chosen the menu, and he hasn’t a clue what’s in the dinner bag, except that she was under strict orders to be as exorbitant as possible when ordering. They’re celebrating, after all. Case closed. Another party-crashing, cake-poisoning murder-clown in custody, another runty human child safe from harm. What’s not to celebrate?

The elevator opens to a sound like no other:

Rain, pounding at every floor-to-ceiling window he has.

Lucifer smirks to liken it all to The Flood: like he’s carrying the detective off to his little ark in the sky, flipping one more allegorical bird to dear old dad.

Chloe picks up the smirk and returns it, not quite understanding.

He feels high.

They set up in the kitchen, but move almost immediately to a nook by the windows: two soft chairs and a tiny table. They think the rain will be pleasant to watch, but it’s gray and chilly instead, and they move almost immediately from _there_ to the couch in front of the fireplace. Chloe goes to get a stack of napkins and when she gets back, there’s a fire roaring. Satan pours more wine.

He lounges on the couch while she stands in front of the coffee table and opens the takeout bag, tearing the little staple from the brown paper fold. Lucifer is immeasurably pleased to find that she’s actually followed his instructions: she presents delectable after glorious delectable, revealing each with a flourish that tickles him, heart and stomach.

“Okay,” she says, halfway deep in the bag, excavating a flat-ish box with both hands. “Now this one is kinda weird, but you said-”

“Yes, I _certainly_ did,” he grins, and leans forward in anticipation. She puts the box down on the table and opens it, sneaking glimpses at his reaction all the while. The dish is marvelous, and he can’t tell what it is, at all. Something chocolatey and gold, literally gold, like flecks of metal, and amid it all lies a mysteriously crispy piece of flesh.

“They called it Holy Mole,” she says. “So I kind of had to.”

His jaw drops in a smile that’s mostly surprise and adoration.

“You know,” she goes on, stifling a giggle, “because you’re the _devil_.”

He can’t close his mouth. The smile wants to stretch, grow, take over, and he doesn’t know whether to let it.

Something changes inside him.

Something's _been_ changing for a while, for years, despite all of his efforts to strap it down, and maybe this is the last thread snapping but he's suddenly cut loose inside himself: thrown into the sky to learn flying by falling.

She notices.

“What?” she says, suddenly hesitant, frozen in her half-crouch in front of the coffee table.

From his seat on the sunken couch, he keeps looking up at her — it’s so rare that he looks _up_ at her — and it all goes off the rails. He becomes so painfully aware of her presence that it seems that, before this second, he’d barely recognized she was here at all.

Her eyes.

Her face.

Her little hair with the cheap highlights all matted from the rain.

A drug he hasn’t taken unfurls through him, dilating his pupils and capillaries and everything else. He feels the flush it makes, the crawling heat of embarrassment on his face and neck, but he can’t stop it. He’s not sure he wants to. He’s never felt anything like it.

Chloe’s looking at him oddly.

He must look odd.

Frozen.

Awkward.

And she must see what’s happening to him — she _must_ — but he can’t tell; he really can’t. He can’t tell almost anything about her — that’s half of why he can’t stand to be apart from her. The other half is panic, terror, uncertainty, and everything else his father made to remind the worms why they need his loving caress in their lives.

What will this worm do?

This very special worm?

This worm who is watching him come apart in real time?

For a moment, the answer is 'nothing.'

Then — over the table between them, over the cartons of gold-flecked sauce and roasty poblanos and sweet, crisp pork skin — she reaches for him.

One hand rests at his shoulder, fingers fleecing his collarbone and dipping into the hollow behind. The other meets the bottom of his jaw, grazing the tree line of his stubble and slipping behind his earlobe. The skin there is no stranger to touch, but at this instant it makes him shiver enough to ward her off (though that’s the absolute last thing in the world he wants).

She puts more weight on him, tentative, testing, but he wants it all. He tenses everywhere so she won’t feel even a hint of give beneath her hands.

Braced on his chest, she leans forward.

She’s going to kiss him, he understands, as if he’s trying to warn himself: _no, look, she’s going to do it, she’s really going to do it!_ He’s thought about this moment so often it feels like he’s lived years of his life with his face three inches from hers. He knows what he wants himself to do; he’s invented a million ways to impress her. But suddenly, rudely, nothing he owns is any longer under his control, and the best he can do is hold himself very, very still. He feels his face open like a flower, lifting from a point at the crown of his head: eyebrows rising from their center, exposing shadows to the fire, creating that open, vulnerable triangle over his eyes.

The face he’s making: he’s seen it before, though not on himself. He’s pitied it.

A puppy begging to get kicked.

A dream ripe for the smashing.

_Oh, god._

Chloe stops. Tilts her head to the side. “I thought you hate when people say that,” she whispers. He can hear the nervous wobble in her voice, but she’s still in better shape than he is. He blinks doe-eyed up at her like an idiot.

“It’s…complicated,” he rasps.

She nods faintly, and smiles the most wonderful smile he’s ever seen.

It frees him from his paralyzing rapture: enough to raise up off the couch, reach over the table and take her by the ribs. She’s weightless in his hands, and it costs him nothing to lift her over the table despite the worried look she gives him mid-air. She has the telltale squirm of someone who’s never submitted to trust, and though he intends to whisk her off to bed, that squirm makes him pause. He holds her there with her feet off the ground, pulling her up to his chest without letting her toes touch the table until she submits, understands, that she will not be dropped. That he is more than capable of handling her, with or without her help.

It takes a bit longer than he expects it to, but he’s not exactly counting the seconds.

He can tell when it sinks in because her abs stop biting at his fingertips, and also because she wraps her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck and makes his grip on her almost irrelevant. She puts her face against the hottest part of his neck and he feels quite swept away again.

“Lucifer,” she says, so quiet it’s like his conscience is speaking. “Ask me.”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about at first, and then-

_Oh, no._

He can’t.

“You’re immune,” he deflects.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t answer the question.”

He blushes more than he ever thought possible. “I’m afraid I'd feel a bit…silly about it, at the moment.”

She smiles. “Okay then. Allow me.” She keeps her legs tight around his hips and leans back, head dipped to look up at him through her eyelashes. “Lucifer Morningstar,” she says, in her best and most awful approximation of his voice: “what is it that you truly desire?”

He’s prepared to laugh, or cringe, or whatever.

He’s not prepared for his mind to slip into the palm of her hand. How is it possible?

“What are you-” he whispers.

“Hmm?” she hums, staring deeper into his eyes. “C’mon.”

“I want,” he begins, aghast. “I want-”

She waits. She’s not going to spare him, so he has to save himself. He pulls her back within mouth’s reach with an arm behind her spine and silences himself with her lips.

“Good answer,” she says, breath against breath.

 _Good_. Good all around. Her lips are good. Her skin is good. She weighs _good_ in his arms.

“But,” she says, “wait, hold on.”

He can barely keep blood enough in his brain, but okay. He can wait.

“I’m afraid that if-” she says, and he hears the sentence break up into a bashful smile before she recovers.

The benefit of his long and flexible neck is that, even chest-to-chest with her, he can draw back and look her in the eyes. The openness in his face fades rapidly into a drawn, fierce darkness. If she wants his most rapt attention, she has it. Fear is not one of his laughing matters.

“I don’t want to be just… one of your many…”

He waits. He expects _harlots_ or _concubines_ or _consorts_.

She says, “lovers,” and the gratitude that wells up in his neck chokes him like a noose.

“I-” he tries, but has to stop to swallow down the knot in his throat. “I don’t want you to be,” he manages, with great effort. His head dips to level a gaze at her. To make sure he has her attention, too. “I don’t think it’s possible.”

He thinks the look she gives him in response resembles a smile, but he isn’t certain. The basics of human communication have escaped him, and he’s left with the body memories of how to stand, how to breathe, how to let his eyes slip closed when hers do, and how to tilt his head to be in the right place, at the right angle, when her mouth alights on his.

His moan is muffled in her mouth, warm and desperate and completely humiliating, which doesn’t make sense and he doesn’t know why. He’s moaned a million moans more wicked or loud or deep than this one. He’s moaned into mouths and skin and other places, and not once with a shred of self-consciousness following him screaming down the hall. But now he feels the shock of hearing himself like a chill on his skin.

_Why now?_

_Why with her?_

Still carrying her around his chest, he threads his legs through the channel between the couch and table, then makes a toe-cleared path toward his bedroom. It gets harder to navigate as he passes the hall closet, when her intermittent kisses sink into a deep and unbreaking lock, and he can barely stay upright. It’s a blessing when he feels the bedroom door in front of him, even moreso when his knees hit the edge of his bed. He tries to put her down, but she’s strong and stubborn and refuses to be let go, so he twists and falls with her, getting a knee up on the mattress before she digs her feet in and drags him the rest of the way.

The bed is perfectly made, sheets crisp and new, as per his demands. It should feel delicious, as usual: pressed and splendid with the scent of jasmine and myrrh. But the hotel-like sterility, the overblown grandiosity, feels suddenly abhorrent to him in a way it’s never been before. He wants only the smell of her shirt, the feel of her couch with the blankets strewn around, the smell of Hawaiian bread and burned butter and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She’s brought hints of it with her, little drifts that he hunts from her body and chases into the foxholes of her limbs.

He wants to use her like a crayon, grind her into the bed until everything is shaded.

Rain-drumming swells against the walls and windows of his bedroom. Like applause, or a warning, or utterly meaningless, like the rest of the whole mad world outside this room at this moment.

She turns him on his back, which isn’t usually where he starts, but he’ll take it. Her little fingers work to undo his buttons. She’s being careful, he realizes. How many times has he told her how nice his suits are? How many times has he told her how nice _she_ is? How could those two numbers be anywhere near each other?

He grips either side of his collar and yanks until it tears. Let her see just how much he cares about bespoke silk when it stands in her way.

She recoils out of the path of the flying buttons, surprised and then laughing. He mimics the shape of her mouth, happy to have pleased her, and then her face disappears down to kiss the flat of his chest, and he has nothing to mimic. His mask falls flat. He lays there, the weight of them both pressing down on his scars, her touch skipping his heart, and finds he has no idea what to do next.

It’s a cruel and strange twist.

His bag of tricks is empty. He can’t recall a single one.

Chloe’s mouth makes its way up to his neck and his chin twists reflexively up and to the side, extending her path. He wants to break free, turn the tables, make her neck bare under his teeth, but he finds himself capable only of arching further, his whole chest up off the bed, mouth opening silently when she bites him hard at the point of his jaw.

His hands obey _her_ , not him: they slide her shirt up over her ribs when she raises her arms, pluck the sleeves from her fingertips and toss the thing from the face of the earth. When she sits back on his hips and thumbs the straps of her bra off her shoulders, his hands go obediently to unclasp the back. And when all he wants is for the damned things to do something impressive with her sensitive bits, they reach up for her hair and stroke along the highlights, tracing them like beams of light.

She looks down on him beatifically. He tries very hard to look human.

“I’m so happy,” she whispers. She pokes experimentally, not exactly romantically, at the dip at the base of his neck. “Are you?”

Is he?

No.

Predominately, he’s terrified. Boneless. And at a loss for… so much. _Happy_ is so far down the list, he can barely see it from the top. But it _is_ on the list.

So he says, “yes,” without lying, and surrenders to her completely.

 

* * *

  
  
Linda’s kind of afraid to ask how it went.

She knows generally what happened.

Basically.

His text hadn’t been ambiguous:

_Deed done. Detective drastically disappointed._

And from the moment he’d walked in, her office had gone cold and lifeless, all the warmth sucked out and replaced with a sense of helpless fury. He’d barely looked at her; just wandered straight to the couch and collapsed into a pile of appendages: the cut branches of a dark tree piled by the side the road.

If not for the look on his face, she’d have thought he was angry. But now, even with his face turned toward the floor, she can see his shame rising like steam.

“Lucifer,” she says, neutrally.

He just shakes his head.

She takes a sympathetic breath and resists reaching out to touch his hand, or his knee, or anything. It’s almost impossible: his mood is like a vortex, like a well that has no bottom, and she’s a moth just like all the other moths that gravitate toward it at any expense. At least she’s aware of her mothiness. It helps her hold herself back, for now, but she’s still his therapist. She has to try to help.

She’s wracking her brain trying to pick the right tack, when Lucifer grinds out:

“ _He_ did this.”

 _He._ The way he says it, it sounds capitalized.

“Your father?” she asks.

“Yes, my father,” he echoes, head rocking on a tense neck. It reminds her of her pressure cooker at full steam.

“Why do you think that?”

He looks up at her, then, with the darkest eyes she’s ever seen, even on him.

“I’m so tired of _why_ ,” he says, staring into the heart of her. It’s hard for her to parse the way it makes her feel to have his gaze drilling through her head, but it’s not…threatening, or terrible, or any of the other things that make people scream and shit themselves at the sight. It feels more like a plea, a wrist-to-wrist hold, something keeping him from going over a cliff.

She stares right back, as hard as she can.

“I hear you,” she says, and a little sigh deflates his shoulders slightly.

As she watches, this small puncture continues to drain him, until his gaze falters and falls somewhere into the corner of the room.

Minutes tick by.

She has to ask.

She doesn’t even want to know the details anymore, but it’s her job to pose questions. Professionally, it shouldn’t matter if it’ll hurt him, but right this moment she sees someone she just wants to hug back to life. She shoves that impulse in the darkest, deepest closet she’s got.

“Lucifer,” she says. He doesn’t look up. “Do you want to tell me what h-”

 _“Absolutely not.”_ His answer comes immediately, scorchingly, despite his shut-off posture.

“Okay,” she says. “You don’t have to.” She pauses. “But maybe we can talk about how you _feel?_ How was it, for you?”

Lucifer frowns, still gazing unfocusedly into the shadows of her potted plants. A long, long minute passes, and his frown deepens, through the passing of cars, the streaming of headlights, the opening and closing of a door in the hall. When he looks up at her again, his face is a mess of lines.

“I-” he says, then bites his lip around the rest. “Shall we say, it wasn’t my finest hour.” He makes air quotes around the last part.

It takes Linda a moment to understand, but then she feels suddenly relieved.

Is _that_ all it is.

No 'I don't love her', no 'she doesn't love me', no 'I felt nothing'...just a little performance anxiety. 

She should have known. After all the meaningless slutting, this one must have seemed terrifyingly high-stakes. Stultifyingly, perhaps.

“Lucifer,” she says, feeling on firmer footing now. “As your therapist, it's no longer my place to say, _but_ : if we’re being realistic, I’m sure that even your worst is-”

“You don’t understand,” he says. “The finger quotes are around both ‘finest’ _and_ ‘hour.’” He drops into quiet misery once again. He _hates_ this; that much is crystal clear. Whatever baggage he’s dragged here is filthy to him, repellent. He’s not here for advice. He’s here to confess, to submit to judgment, if only he’s able to force himself to do it.

“I was,” he says, finally mustering the will, “utterly ordinary.”

Linda is beyond skeptical. But Lucifer stares daggers through his eyes at her face until she remembers he doesn’t lie, and she becomes lost for words, except the one.

_“You?”_

_“Me!”_ he says, in complete agreement with her disbelief.

“What…happened?”

“Very, very little,” he says acerbically, and accelerates from there, floodgates creaking open. “I was- _humiliated_. Cursed. Could barely lift a finger.” He’s turning red. There are things he wants to tell and things he doesn’t, and they’re the same. “I just laid there,” he sputters. “I just _laid there_. And I didn’t do the thing, or the other thing, or the other thing, and then-” He cringes at the memory alone, gasping.

She has to derail this train. “And what did Chloe say?” she asks.

“What?”

“How did she react? What was her response to all this?”

The question makes him stop to think.

Truthfully, he doesn’t quite remember. Everything after checking the clock is a blur. It’s a reflex: he always checks the clock. He has records to make, records to break. And certainly, even if his performance had been less than spectacular, he’d hoped he’d made up for it in longevity. He’d been positive he’d hit at least an hour…right up until the clock had told him no.

Ten minutes.

_Ten fucking minutes._

Not long, but certainly long enough to completely shatter the only expectations he actually cared to meet. If he’d shown his face in front of the Detective after that, it might’ve burned off — again — so he’d run to the bathroom. Then he’d run a little bit further, and a bit further than that, until he’d texted Linda from the atrium of a hotel, trying to keep himself out of the bar.

Linda has to hold him hostage in absolute, unforgiving silence to make him admit he'd run, after which she leans over her crossed legs, wanting to hit him or hug him or something. Still, she tries to stay a therapist. She’s just kind of pissed off on everybody’s behalf. “Why do you do this?” she asks.

Lucifer looks at her, self-hating right down to his bones, and has no real answer except that it’s Chloe. It’s Chloe, and this sensation of wanting to run and hide hadn’t ever, _ever_ happened upon him before he met her.

“Lucifer,” Linda says. “Go home.”

He hangs his head.

“No, wait-” she corrects herself. “Wherever Chloe is, which by this point could be a convent: go there.”

His jaw clenches so hard she can see the muscles flex around the top of his head.

“Go there, all right? — and when you get there, _if_ she lets you through the door, take out your ego, throw it on the floor in front of her, and _stab it to death.”_ She hasn’t ever really spoken to a patient like this, but it seems warranted. She stands, drawing herself up in anger, and Lucifer stands too, out of reflex, maybe confusion. He hasn’t really seen this from a therapist before, or anyone, actually, that isn’t celestially-oriented.

“Then, get a bat,” she continues, eyebrows reaching up over the rims of her glasses. She starts advancing on him, which makes him back away, along the couch and toward the door. “Actually, get two bats, one for you and one for her, and beat the corpse together; I mean, really beat the _shit_ out of it. Until there’s just no way it could _ever_ come back. And when it’s dead, stuff it in a barrel, fill the barrel with cement, roll it off the pier and _forget it ever existed.”_

She’s caged him with his back almost to the door. His hand reaches behind for the handle.

For a teensy tiny little second she puts a smile on her face, but it is savage in every way.

“Are you picking up what I’m laying down?” she intones.

He nods.

The door handle clicks behind his back.

And then he’s gone.

 

* * *

  
  
Linda was right: Chloe’s not home. It’s the first place he goes, and when she doesn’t answer the door he walks in anyway.

Nobody’s there, not even Maze. Trixie’s absence barely registers on his radar, and only as a general emptiness. A coldness.

He tries the precinct next, but she’s not there, either. The night sergeant sees him coming and just shakes his head.

When he gets back out on the street, it’s stopped raining. Everything’s still wet and gray but the waterworks are off.

He’s been gone from her side for almost eight hours, and he’s afraid for every minute more that passes.

_Where is she?_

Her voicemail is full. He’s filled it. He’s sent well beyond a reasonable number of texts, most of them coherent, but his phone remains silent and dead. There’s nothing more he can do, save trawling every coffee shop in Los Angeles, so he goes home. And that, as it would be, is where he finds her.

She’s in his bed, sipping off a cup from the Coffee Bean. The whole room smells like coffee. There’s another cup on the bedside table and he doesn’t even need to ask. It’s for him, he knows, because he recognizes his favorite barista’s loopy hearts decorating the cup, the biggest one drawn with devil horns and a little forked tail. Ashlee; wonderful girl.

So the Detective had been out of bed, if only long enough to pop downstairs for caffeine.

And yet, she’d come back.

His confusion keeps Lucifer back, arms spanning the doorway, forearm braced on the jamb like someone might try to drag him inside. He searches the scene in front of him for clues, but she sips her coffee intractably and takes a full five seconds to look up at him. When she does, his throat clenches a little. Should he speak first? Should he wait for her cue? Linda’s instructions had been unhelpfully metaphorical, he realizes. He should have asked for something far more specific.

“You’re back,” Chloe says. She seems casual, normal. Maybe even chipper. But he can hear that undertone.

“Yes,” he says, not moving.

“Something you had to do?” she asks.

He blinks. “Yes?” he says.

“Finished?”

He tilts his head. Where is this going? Is there a trap at the end? “Yes,” he affirms.

She purses her lips and licks a little soy foam from the top of the cup. “Okay,” she says.

_Okay._

He feels the beginnings of confidence returning to him, but it’s not a secure thing. He knows he’s run off for what should have been — might still have been — one time too many, especially given the activity of the evening, and she is far too calm for the firebreather he knows she is.

He lets his arm fall from the door jamb as a test. She doesn’t react.

He takes a step into the room.

Then another.

She sips coffee and looks out the window, and lets him get right up next to the bed before turning a glare on him that could turn mortals into stone. Devils too, apparently.

“You think you’re getting into this bed,” she says. Her voice doesn’t match her face. It’s still nonchalant, upbeat. That’s how he knows that whatever she’s got in mind, it’s going to be excruciating.

Good.

_Good._

If she can find the penance to absolve him of this — this and everything else, all his other shortcomings and runnings-away — he’ll welcome it with open arms.   

“It _is_ my bed,” he says, and immediately wants to slap himself. Can he not push back, for once? Can he not test it?  

But his test doesn’t test her.

“Not anymore,” she says.

He knows she means this as a threat or some other sort of disparagement. He knows this, and yet hearing it, his heart glows furiously through his fear. His confidence breaks up out of its coffin, through the dirt. _Not anymore._ His whole existence he’s shared this bed with a parade of God’s creatures, all shapes and sizes and bits and pieces, and it’s never occurred to him that _sharing_ wasn’t what he wanted. He starts to shiver.

“Yes,” he says. Yes to all of it, even what she hasn’t said yet.

“We’ve got some things to talk about,” she said.

“Yes,” he agrees. Fervently. The shivering intensifies.

“And you’re going to stand there and talk about it.”

He nods. He stands up a little straighter, even the little stumps of muscles between his shoulder blades righting themselves. If they were still attached, his wings would be held at attention, quivering and half-folded as if ready to dive.

“Let’s start with what scares the devil himself,” she says. She picks up his coffee and extends it to him. He takes it with a shaky hand but stays where she put him, at the foot of the bed. He’ll earn his way back. She’ll make him.

He feels such gratitude that he gives her exactly what she asks for.

 

* * *

  
  
It’s dawn by the time he makes it between the sheets again.

She pulls them back and he slides in, stripping off his clothes in a clumsy rush and vacuum sealing all six-foot-three of himself around her. He’s getting the hang of nonsexual physical affection, slowly but surely. This still counts, he tells himself, even if they’re both half naked and his face is firmly interjected between her shoulder and cheek. And forget what El Diablito is doing pressed up against her ass; there’s nothing he can do about that, and they’ll both just have to live with it.

Or, you know, enjoy it.

“I guess I should take it as a compliment,” she muses, having dropped her cool detachment altogether. “After — how many did you say?”

“Millions.”

“Right. Billions.” He can hear her eyes rolling. “After _trillions_ of human sexcapades, I’m the only one who ever threw off your game.”

“Yes,” he murmurs happily.

“Because you just love me _so_ much,” she teases.

His smile drops.

Well.

He’d never said _that_.  

But.

“Yes,” he says. Then again, grinning until his ears hurt. “Yes.” She wiggles a bit into him, asking to be held firmer, and he snugs her up with his free arm. The other is under her head and can’t do much but reach back and touch her hair.

Everything still smells a little bit like coffee, though the cups are long empty.

Out the window, the sun is coming out; no rain today.

The flood is past them.

And all this time, he’d thought the ark was his.

 

 


End file.
